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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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For several years now I have been
watching, with weary distaste,
a comparatively new development in the history of the Church Militant — the
insistence on having a tape recorder on hand for every gathering of brethren
who have come together to discuss the problems of the Church. Apparently this
innovation is based on a passage of non-canonical Scripture: “Where
two or three are gathered together in My Name, a tape
recorder must be in the midst of them” (I Beelzebub 13:13). I have given the
matter much careful thought. (Please hold that question about whether college
administrators can think; I intend to take that up in a later
column.) Apparently this mania for tape-recording is either a form of sadism or
a heretical emphasis on perfectionism. Under the reading of perfectionism the
demand for a tape recorder seems to be based on the idea that everything that
is said in the heat of a debate or the relaxed atmosphere of a discussion is
complete, final, and
perfect and that it must therefore be preserved for posterity.

Seen as sadism,
the tape recorder syndrome is, of course, the
idea that a man can be haunted and persecuted from now until eternity by an
unhappy phrase, an incomplete statement,
or a mere lapse of the tongue. “This is what the man said in 1950!”
the tape recorder disciples cry,
“and now we can throw it
into his teeth, shout it from the housetops,
and publish it verbatim in our magazines. He said it,
he can’t deny it, and we’ll
plague him with it until he totters into his grave — and maybe even beyond
that.” One can almost see a new vision of the Dies
Irae with the Judge upon his throne,
listening to tape recorders
smuggled past the gate of death by those who, in this
life, thought they did Him service by playing
the part of accuser of their brethren.

Whatever
the theology and psychology of the tape recorder idea may be,
it is easy to forget that as an instrument for capturing and preserving truth
it is singularly inadequate and weak. Have you ever seen a transcription of one
of your lectures or sermons taken from a tape recorder? It is a shattering
experience. Did I really leave all of those sentences incomplete? Am I really
so illiterate, particularly in the wrong places — “a”
when I thought I had said “the,” a solemn-appearing sentence which I had
uttered in a sarcastic tone of Voice, syntax scrambled like a plate of
spaghetti, the ascription of a saying to Isaiah
when I know well enough it is from Amos,
“uhs”
and “ahs” all over the place? Is this what my
audience really heard? The answer is clear. On one level this is precisely what
they heard. On another and far more important level this has no relation at all
to what they heard. For they heard a man, not a machine. They saw his gestures,
the changing expressions of his face. They knew his mood.

The tape recorder can faithfully
reproduce words. It can not reproduce the milieu in which the words were
spoken. But surely the milieu is just as important as the words themselves. And
so, after long study,
I have re solved never to expose myself to a situation in which three of us are
gathered together — the brother, I, and the tape recorder. I may be
old-fashioned, but I prefer that the third presence be
that of our Lord — the Lord of forgiveness and mercy — who has known for thou
sands of years how weak and inarticulate we are when we try,
as we must, to pour His thoughts into the shallow
molds of our poor human words.

By
the way, all of what I have been saying about the
inadequacies of the tape-recorder applies to those who are constantly throwing
Luther’s Tischreden at us. Veit Dietrich,
the faithful (but, one suspects,
rather dull) scribe was the sixteenth-century counterpart of our tape
recorders. Aside from the hazards noted in the paragraphs above,
how would you like to be quoted, word by endless word,
on something you said after a heavy dinner, with perhaps two or three glasses of
good German beer under your belt, and in the company of your best friends
who, in your opinion,
could do with an occasional shock to blast them out of their academic rut?
Luther had a brilliant, provocative,
dancing mind and it would appear that good conversation was one of his favorite
forms of recreation. And if one credits him with the puckish sense of humor
that one keeps running into in even his serious writings,
one can imagine how he must have enjoyed baiting the solemn Philip,
the serious theologians, and the slavish note taker,
Dietrich. I can imagine Blessed Martin slipping into his nightshirt after a
session with the boys and almost choking with laughter as he recounted to Katie
how he had shocked poor Philip with some outrageous observation on the validity
of humanistic study and Katie answering,
“Really,
Martin, you have got to quit teasing poor Philip
like that. He’s so frail, you
know.” But I am sure that the very remark that
Blessed Martin considered his joke of the evening has been dealt with at length
in a monograph by some German theologian,
probably under some such
title as Luthers Ansichten ueber den Humanismus, Dargestellt Anhand einer Bemerkung zu Melanchthon in den
Tisch reden.